Friday, May 18, 2012

Solidarity with Syria

Theo Russell, Prof Majid and Andy Brooks share a joke

By New Workercorrespondent

NEW WORKER supporters and members of the Arab community in London
heard two stirring calls to stand by Syria
at a New Worker public meeting last
week. Prof Kamal Majid, the vice-president of the Stop the War Coalition and New
Communist Party leader Andy Brooks spoke in detail about the moves of US-led
imperialism and their Arab agents to overthrow the Assad government.

The
meeting was chaired by Theo Russell from the
NCP London District, which has sponsored a number of New Worker public meetings in central London
over the past year or so.

Prof Majid, a
communist who writes on current affairs in the Arab media, covered the efforts
of the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda to spread terror and sectarian division
across Syria as
part of the imperialist plan to replace the Syrian government with a puppet
state, à la Libya,
that would do the bidding of the Americans and Zionists.

Andy Brooks
reported on the stand taken by the major trends within Syria’s
communist movements in support of genuine reform but opposed to all attempts to
tear up the new constitution. Both broadly agreed on the need to build
solidarity with Syria’s
progressive and democratic forces that have closed ranks around the Arab
Socialist Renaissance Party (Baath) to end the violence and defend the gains of
the Syrian national revolution.

Kumar Sarkar, from Second Wave Publications,
took the floor to raise the issue of the balance of forces in Syria
and the class issues at stake in the current turmoil. Both main speakers said
this would take hours to cover but, in fact, the questions were easy to answer.

As Andy Brooks
pointed out imperialism can never solve the problems of the Arabs or indeed any
other people in the world and it never claims to do so. It flies the false flag
of “human rights” to justify neo-colonialist aggression and what it is doing in
Syria is what it has done in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan and what it hopes to
do in Iran if it gets half the chance.